Do Atheists believe in Heaven?

[unapologetic]

'Fundamentalist' is a term they chose for themselves (i think).
'Fundy' is a corruption of that.
Atheists never called ourselves 'Fundamentalist'.
So 'Fundy' should not be applied to us. It's just weird. You would not be talking about me or anyone I know.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Even most fundamentalist "Christians" are actually fundamentalist Protestants, and mostly they're fundamentalist Baptists.

Fundamentalism necessarily requires a sect small enough to be homogenous, because if it's not, it will split over the disagreements, no matter how apparently trivial those disagreements might seem to outsiders.

Will not!

 

[Elixir]

Desperate theists routinely project their “god” superstitions upon atheists.
Not that atheists can’t be superstitious; they can be and often are. But their superstitions rarely if ever involve tri-Omni creator beings. Which pisses off theists no end.
But “Heaven” is vague enough that virtually any imaginary or actual place, time, event or activity can apply

 

[DBT]

Christian morality? Is it moral to say "believe X or face eternal damnation, believe in Jesus as your redeemer or suffer eternal torment"

 

[ideologyhunter]

Sure. As Jesus said, "If your son asks for bread, will you give him a stone? If he asks for fish, will you give him a snake? No, you will love him, as God loves us, and if he loves you not in return, then take him to the basement and set him on fire."
Pretty sure that's in Matthew 7.

 

[DBT]

Ah, the God of love and tender mercy.

"The Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works". Psalm 145.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Ah, the God of love and tender mercy.

"The Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works". Psalm 145.

He clothed man and woman, he damned Cain but gave him protection, he flooded the world but then promised not to do it again. The mercies get smaller as time goes on.

 

[Jarhyn]

I'm trying to imagine how an atheist would conceptualize an afterlife -- one that was created by no one....one that is counterposed to everything we observe about brain function...one that would seem to have no connection to the morality of one's earthly life.
No, that's not our brand. To be an atheist means that one accepts that life is a one-way ticket, and that mortality is the underlying reality in life. If it doesn't mean that, then one is just clinging to some residual fantasies from early church experiences.

Ok, so, if we're talking supernatural afterlives, I don't think atheists think supernatural afterlife could exist without a god, they just don't believe that the god must exist. Many of us still hope there is a god, after a fashion, who has stood up something like this for us, and that they are not shitty administrators so as to fuck it up.

Being an atheist means not *counting* on that.

It also means not counting on it being *perfect*, even if it exists, which it probably doesn't.

I have literally described whole frameworks that would enable this and everything else that we see with respect to simulationism: if you can export a character from any video game world you please, AI and all, why couldn't you do the same to a human?

 

[ideologyhunter]

How is that any more probable, provable, or dependent on evidence than Bible fantasy?
(Life of Johnson)...Boswell was discussing Bishop Berkeley's concept of immateriality with Samuel Johnson, the idea that seeming material objects have no reality outside of our perceptions. Boswell concluded that "although we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it." Johnson responded by striking his foot "with mighty force against a large stone, <saying> 'I refute it thus.'"

 

[Jarhyn]

How is that any more probable, provable, or dependent on evidence than Bible fantasy?
(Life of Johnson)...Boswell was discussing Bishop Berkeley's concept of immateriality with Samuel Johnson, the idea that seeming material objects have no reality outside of our perceptions. Boswell concluded that "although we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it." Johnson responded by striking his foot "with mighty force against a large stone, <saying> 'I refute it thus.'"

Its more probable because it's logically coherent according to systems theory when the Bible is not. It is hypothetically *possible*, albeit unnecessary. It is something we can at least hope for as much as we hope against the inter-dimensional tyrant concept.

The issue with it is that the conditions for the logical consistency of it all depend largely on expectations not just of conduct but on one's internal reasons for conduct as to what decisions such a thing would make. It means trying to be a good person and worrying about what that even means, rather than taking it for granted.

 

[Learner]

Christian morality? Is it moral to say "believe X or face eternal damnation, believe in Jesus as your redeemer or suffer eternal torment"

Christian morality according Christ is to .. love your neighbour,love your enemy, love and feed the poor and hungry and so on and so on.

Simply put by the context of your statement, like other atheists with this logic:

Its either you 'love your neighbour etc & etc.' as mentioned above, OR it's damnation!

The logic of the "argument" made here, should be bewildering.

 

[DBT]

Christian morality? Is it moral to say "believe X or face eternal damnation, believe in Jesus as your redeemer or suffer eternal torment"

Christian morality according Christ is to .. love your neighbour,love your enemy, love and feed the poor and hungry and so on and so on.

Simply put by the context of your statement, like other atheists with this logic:

Its either you 'love your neighbour etc & etc.' as mentioned above, OR it's damnation!

The logic of the "argument" made here, should be bewildering.

My question was; can eternal damnation for a lack of conviction in the existence of God, Jesus as your saviour, be taken as a just penalty or a moral act? Does the punishment fit the 'crime?'

 

[ideologyhunter]

Christian morality according Christ is to .. love your neighbour,love your enemy, love and feed the poor and hungry and so on and so on.



Its either you 'love your neighbour etc & etc.' as mentioned above, OR it's damnation!

Goddddddamn! The Republican Party is going to hell??

 

[Learner]

Christian morality according Christ is to .. love your neighbour,love your enemy, love and feed the poor and hungry and so on and so on.



Its either you 'love your neighbour etc & etc.' as mentioned above, OR it's damnation!

Goddddddamn! The Republican Party is going to hell??

Possibly, but did you get the point, and irony of it?

Why would you choose NOT to love your neighbour in the first place?

 

[pood]

I'm trying to imagine how an atheist would conceptualize an afterlife -- one that was created by no one....one that is counterposed to everything we observe about brain function...one that would seem to have no connection to the morality of one's earthly life.
No, that's not our brand. To be an atheist means that one accepts that life is a one-way ticket, and that mortality is the underlying reality in life. If it doesn't mean that, then one is just clinging to some residual fantasies from early church experiences.

Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence.

 

[pood]

Even most fundamentalist "Christians" are actually fundamentalist Protestants, and mostly they're fundamentalist Baptists.

I basically get what you're saying here, and mostly agree.
But I think that "fundamentalist" is mainly a euphemism for "extremist", in this context. Believe me, there are Catholic extremists, Teaparty extremists, you name it. Ideological attachments to human authority have a way of generating "fundamentalist" followers. People who would rather fight for the authority of their choice than employ critical thinking skills.
Tom

Yeah, fundamentalist pro-Israeli destruction of Gaza supporters … and note that Netanyahu’s also cloaks that in the mantle of religion, naming his attack Operation Gideon’s Chariots.

 

[ideologyhunter]

Christian morality according Christ is to .. love your neighbour,love your enemy, love and feed the poor and hungry and so on and so on.



Its either you 'love your neighbour etc & etc.' as mentioned above, OR it's damnation!

Goddddddamn! The Republican Party is going to hell??

Possibly, but did you get the point, and irony of it?

Why would you choose NOT to love your neighbour in the first place?

Just for starters, the asshole has wind chimes, which means I can't sleep with the windows open.

 

[pood]

There are several potentially plausible models for a kind of afterlife without any reference to god or the supernatural.

One candidate is Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence of the same, in which you subjectively simply live your life over again, forever, without any knowledge of having lived it before. This is potentially supported by the Minkowski block world, in which your life is simply “baked in” to the fabric of spacetime eternally between your birth and death. Although we only subjectively experience one moment followed by the next, all our previous moments are still there in spacetime, and on this account we should, upon death, simply experience the sequential moments all over again from birth.

A variant is the quantum multiverse idea, in which we experience eternal recurrence, but not of the same. Instead, we experience every possible paths of our lives eternally, in accordance with the Born Rule.

Kastrup’s analytic idealism proposes that the universe is a giant mind, and individual lives are “dissociate alters” of the whole mind. He thinks it’s possible that after death, we reunite with the universal mind, and our experience actually broadens.

Another variant is Tom Clark’s generic subjectivity, which he discusses in a paper at naturalism.org. On this account, a form of reincarnation without a soul, on death our subjective awareness simply shifts to a different perspective, a different person. Wayne Stewart also advocates for this, and calls it existential passage.

 

[Learner]

Christian morality according Christ is to .. love your neighbour,love your enemy, love and feed the poor and hungry and so on and so on.



Its either you 'love your neighbour etc & etc.' as mentioned above, OR it's damnation!

Goddddddamn! The Republican Party is going to hell??

Possibly, but did you get the point, and irony of it?

Why would you choose NOT to love your neighbour in the first place?

Just for starters, the asshole has wind chimes, which means I can't sleep with the windows open.

Well, what does one expect when you're closed-in like a box? A boxed room, a box mentality, everything box-like.

Just do herself a favour, and open the windows 'think outside of it ' where all the fresh air is at.

 

[pood]

Christian morality according Christ is to .. love your neighbour,love your enemy, love and feed the poor and hungry and so on and so on.



Its either you 'love your neighbour etc & etc.' as mentioned above, OR it's damnation!

Goddddddamn! The Republican Party is going to hell??

Possibly, but did you get the point, and irony of it?

Why would you choose NOT to love your neighbour in the first place?

Just for starters, the asshole has wind chimes, which means I can't sleep with the windows open.

Well, what does one expect when you're closed-in like a box? A boxed room, a box mentality, everything box-like.

Just do herself a favour, and open the windows 'think outside of it ' where all the fresh air is at.

One hopes you are speaking into a mirror.

The box in this case is close-minded, fundy religion that takes metaphors and parables and outright fairy tales to be literally true.